After having stop tanking during Wrath, I recently started tanking in raids again, after being determined to try something new and different for Cataclysm. While I do enjoy tanking a great deal, and like the casual position I have, over the last few raids, I've been having a twofold issue.

In my raid team, there's three of us who can tank, myself as Prot, a Blood DK, and a recently returned to WoW feral druid. Our healers are a Holy Paladin, Disc Priest and Resto Shaman. The issues are this: it's the general consensus of the healer team that of the three possible tanks, I am the hardest to heal on boss fights and on trash. I am also finding that recently I am struggling to keep threat off my co-tank, the DK, and on occasion, our feral. In terms of gear our DK and I are equally geared, with our feral just getting started in Firelands.

Our last raid's log: http://tinyurl.com/eos102811 During this raid, we decided that rather then have me tank on two bosses I normally I would, we would switch and have our DK tank. It was unanimous in that the healers felt that they had a far easier time healing, then in the past.

I have spent time over the last few weeks going over logs, and this forum, as well as Tankspot, but at this point I'm close to telling the guild to switch tanks around. Especially given the feeling of our other two tanks being far easier to heal. Prior to this I would have said I was an all right tank, nothing special, but also nothing terrible, but now..I'm reading posts and honestly confused as to what I am doing wrong.

Good move posting logs and armory link and looking through the stickies on this forum.

My first point would be the wonderful website called ask mr robot. Theckhd here has helped with the numbers used on the site for the calculations of upgrade pieces, gemming and reforging so it is a really good tool particularly for more casual players.

Looking briefly at your gear through this I realise that you have not yet reached the combat table coverage (this makes you less bursty and steadier/easier to heal). If you upgrade a couple of items (Valour point neck & ring and blacksmithing boots) you can easily get to 102.39 (you should be trying for 102.4 total avoidance (dodge + parry + block + 5% inate miss chance) as this will mean that every physical hit from a normal boss (Baleroc is a it weird) will be either blocked, parried, dodged or miss entirely. Mr. Robot allows you to change pieces and see where this would put you so is worth a good play around. The upgrades I've suggested are below:

Thank you for the tips Calleana. I have been (almost daily at this point), going over Mr.Robot and Rawr - part of the reason I'm getting frustrated is that I do what is suggested, only to turn around and have my healers go, "Not working." I would dearly love the crafted boots, but alas, on my server at least, finding someone who has a pattern other then the plate healing patterns is a long shot.

I would really reccomend looking at your rotation as shielf of righteousness should be cast very regularly and it doesn't look from your logs like this is happening. Perhaps you need to also look at your UI as I found the new rotation (in cataclysm) made a lot more sense when I moved buttons around and made things flow for me better on my screen.

Brekkie:Tanks are like shitty DPS. And healers are like REALLY distracted DPSAmirya:Why yes, your penis is longer than his because you hit 30k dps in the first 10 seconds. But guess what? That raid boss has a dick bigger than your ego. Flex:I don't make mistakes. I execute carefully planned strategic group wipes.Levie:(in /g) It's weird, I have a collar and I dont know where I got it from, Worgen are kinky!Levie:Drunk Lev goes and does what he pleases just to annoy sober Lev.Sagara:You see, you need to *spread* the bun before you insert the hot dog.

She* and I mean Shield of righteousness, getting the rotation right and into your muscle memory will mean that you can focus on particular fight mechanics more. There are a couple of instances in your logs show you getting hit by avoidable damage, to me it makes sense that you will have more attention and focus to spend on mechnics if you don't have to worry about your rotation.

Calleana wrote:She* and I mean Shield of righteousness, getting the rotation right and into your muscle memory will mean that you can focus on particular fight mechanics more. There are a couple of instances in your logs show you getting hit by avoidable damage, to me it makes sense that you will have more attention and focus to spend on mechnics if you don't have to worry about your rotation.

sorry, she

and she does have a pointonce you have that muscle memory, you will focus more on the fight and not on your rotation

Brekkie:Tanks are like shitty DPS. And healers are like REALLY distracted DPSAmirya:Why yes, your penis is longer than his because you hit 30k dps in the first 10 seconds. But guess what? That raid boss has a dick bigger than your ego. Flex:I don't make mistakes. I execute carefully planned strategic group wipes.Levie:(in /g) It's weird, I have a collar and I dont know where I got it from, Worgen are kinky!Levie:Drunk Lev goes and does what he pleases just to annoy sober Lev.Sagara:You see, you need to *spread* the bun before you insert the hot dog.

I think it might be me and having just gotten off the graveyard shift from hell, but I am still honestly confused. How is switching my finisher going to help lessen the strain on my healers? Am I missing a glyph or talent or just plain missing the point (distinctly possible, I get weird after 12 hours of freight). I would argue my muscle memory on the rotation bars I have set is pretty good - I won't say perfect, because really, there's always room for improvements, but I would place it being better then when I'd previously tanked.

I guess I might have phrased my original question wrong? What I think I'm trying to find out, is why, compared to my two other tanks, the healers just seem to struggle a bit more when we're all about equally geared, and skilled.

sfrog wrote:I guess I might have phrased my original question wrong? What I think I'm trying to find out, is why, compared to my two other tanks, the healers just seem to struggle a bit more when we're all about equally geared, and skilled.

The biggest issue with healers and tanks is familiarity. So if you are freshly back and the DK has been tanking for a while they could be familair with him and know how to react. Comparing two Staghelm fights you took nearly 150K less melee damage then he did but he countered it by roughly 150K in heals/absorbs. So your actual external healing needed was roughly the same.

We live in a society where people born on third base constantly try to steal second, yet we expect people born with two strikes against them to hit a homerun on the first pitch.

It looks like Ixi is opting for Inquisition vs ShoR, as on boss kills he has 70% Inq uptime. But that doesn't address his core concern.

If you're dealing with your healer's perceptions vs hard data, there's not much that can be done about that. Looking at the log you posted, on boss kills you took 68 hits avg 18k, 321 block, avg 17k. The DK took 749 hits, avg 25k.

It is hard to get a handle on comparative damage intake since the two of you are doing different things for each fight. If you have logs of you and them each tanking a boss we could do more digging.

I would recommend that you do what you can to block cap -- you should be there raid buffed and using an Elixir of the Master/Prismatic Elixir (EotM grants 2.82% block). It also looks like you're using Fine gems in your yellow slots -- you might consider going full Fractured there, as you'll get more CTC out of pure mastery vs mastery/parry. It also looks like you're missing one JC gem, which will also help cover the difference. I personally put my JC gems in the BS slots and Relic, and put a Fractured gem in the Belt Buckle (you've got a green in there now).

You really should have the smoothest damage intake of all your tanking corps, tbqh. You're close enough to CTC that the difference shouldn't be glaring. It's hard to say what your healer's issue is.

Edit: other than, as Flex posted whilst I was writing this, familiarity.

Thank you Fuzzygeek and Flex, that is exactly what I was looking for. I'll try that out for our raids this weekend. I'll also see if I can get logs of his tanking Boss X verses myself.

I've always been proud of being an easy-to-heal tank so this issue was rather disturbing. Thank you all for your input, and suggestions. I'll give them a go and let you know how it went. I do want to make sure that the healing team has an easy as I can make it time when it comes to the tanks in the raid; as a former healer for this Xpac, it's near and dear to my heart.